bibleless peoples

If we ask how many languages have a translation of the Bible we get one number. But if we ask how many people have the Bible in their language we get a very different number.

Of the 7 billion people on our planet 6 billion have the Bible in their heart language, which is 86 percent. But only 9 percent of the world’s languages have the whole Bible. That’s 650 out of 7,000 languages. Another 23 percent of languages have the NT. So close to 1/3 of languages worldwide have at least the NT.

The situation in Ghana is similar. 87 percent of Ghanaians have the Bible in their language; very close to the 86 percent worldwide. But that’s only about a third of Ghana’s languages.

The large differences between the percentage of languages and the percentages of people are due, of course, to the fact that there are big languages and small. All of the biggest languages in Africa, for example, have the Bible.

Although there are still some larger languages without the whole Bible, translating the Bible into more languages is mostly about the smaller and often marginalized peoples – “the least of these”. Each new translation is not so much an attempt to change the world, but rather to create in-depth and lasting transformation in one place – to connect at the deepest level for lasting impact. It is also about including those not yet included in God’s kingdom.

Like this:

I have always tried to preach where people have never heard about Christ (Romans 15:20 CEV)

John Piper calls this a Holy Ambition. Piper is far from alone in getting inspiration from the Apostle’s desire to take the good new about Jesus to places where it has not yet been announced. The website JoshuaProject.net is dedicated to listing all the peoples and languages of the world and the degree to which each has heard the good news. As is evident from perusing the website, intentionally taking the good new to new places requires research. One cannot just strike off in a random direction and hope to encounter a people who has not heard of Jesus.

I have colleagues who have spent a good part of their lives going out into the field and finding out where languages are, how many people speak them, if the people in one location can understand the people in another and if the language is dying out or perhaps growing. One of them is Ted Bergman who was an engineer before getting involved in Bible translation. After spending a couple decades training, organizing and leading small teams of researchers across Africa, he set out to find out how many places there in the world where there are no Christians, no missionaries and no Bible in the language of the people — a triple no.

The purpose of the research, of course, is so that people will know of those places and take action to remove one or more no. He found 138 such places. There are none in North America, South America or the Pacific. There is only one in Europe. The majority are in Asia but there are also a number in the Middle East and 18 in Africa. Just three countries have over half of the 138 places, but 19 countries have at least one. You can look at the list yourself, just ignore the columns of codes only missiologists understand.

I was a missionary for a while before I fully appreciated that missions requires research. Not the kind of research one does in a lab or on a computer, but rather the kind where one goes out among the people, talks to them, and seeks to understand their situation. What language do they speak? Have they ever heard an adequate presentation of the good news? Are there missionaries working among them? How many of them are Christians, if any? What religion do they follow? Is there a Bible in their language? This research is seeking out every niche where the good news of Jesus is still missing. A few months back, I was involved in an inter-agency committee in Ghana where we looked at research, made inquiries and came up with a list of all the remaining Bible translation needs in Ghana. What’s cool about that is the efforts now being made to shrink that list until it has nothing on it.

Area near the town of Goz Béïda in Chad which is near the Dar Sila Daju language area, one of the places with no Christians, no missionaries and no Bible